


Home(sickness) Remedies

by chofi



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: 5 + 1, Cloud Strife tries his best, Gen, Home Cooking, Homesickness, Zack Fair & Cloud Strife Friendship, Zack Fair is best boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-27 07:22:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20042119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chofi/pseuds/chofi
Summary: Five times Zack Fair tried to help Cloud Strife with his homesickness, and the one time Cloud helped Zack with his.





	Home(sickness) Remedies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LaguNerd](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaguNerd/gifts).

Cloud stared at the diagrams and graphs, wishing the information could just flow from the pages directly to his brain. He wondered, not for the first time, who exactly _needed_ to memorize all of these formulas except for sadist instructors who wanted to suck out your soul and eat it. He wondered, not for the first time, if his schooling would be enough to get him through. He sighed and turned back to the explanation in the text. Maybe the fourth reread would be the lucky one.

"What're you still doing in here? Don't you need a break?" Cloud turned to the voice. Zack had appeared, and was heading towards him. 

"'m studying, Zack," Cloud answered, turning back to the book. "I can't take a break until I understand this."

"What're you studying?" Zack peered over Cloud's shoulder. "Materia growth and compatibility formulas? Ugh, who even _uses_ those?"

Cloud huffed. "I have an evaluation my next class. _I_ have to use those."

Zack shrugged. "Just saying, I don't think I've _ever_ had to calculate that stuff after learning it. Who's your instructor? Is it Hei--"

Cloud slammed his palms down on the table. "Don't," he said, barely above a whisper. "Don't tell me things I'm doing are pointless." He stared down at a graph, willing the burning in his eyes to go away. 

Cloud felt Zack's hands on his shoulders. "Nah," Zack said. "It's not pointless. You're giving your brain a workout."

Cloud snorted. His mother would say things like that.

"When you get into Soldier, we'll spend hours talking shit about your classes. Swap stories." 

"Wouldn't mind talking shit about them now," Cloud wouldn't mind having already been accepted into Soldier now either, but Zack already knew that. "But I didn't go halfway around the world just to get my ass kicked for existing. I could've just stayed home for _that_." 

"Spike," Zack said, "I think you're homesick."

Homesick? For _Nibelheim_? For being far away from everything he wanted? For always being abandoned by anyone near his age and only having his mother in his corner? "No," Cloud mumbled, looking down at the book again. "I'm not. I've been here for months, and I'm _fine_."

Zack shrugged. "Calling it like I see it." He reached over to close Cloud's book. "Study break," he said over Cloud's squeaks of protest. "You've gotta get a change of scenery. I'm taking you out of here."

Cloud made himself go silent. He put his hand on his book's cover. He opened the book again.

Zack groaned. "I'll drill you on the damn formulas while we're walking around, all right?"

Cloud nodded and closed the book. He gathered his things and stood up. "I thought you said you never used them?"

"Doesn't mean they haven't been burned into my head."

* * *

The next time Cloud was at a desk--after the evaluation that went surprisingly well--Zack decided to say hello by dumping a pile of notebooks in front of Cloud's face. It looked like Zack had raided the stationary section of the nearest hundred-gil store.

Cloud took a deep breath, made a note of where he'd left off on his report, then gestured at the pile. "What _is_ this?"

Zack grinned. "Notebooks. Didn't know if you were a line, no-line, or graph kind of guy. I think there's some with the dots, too?"

"I _have_ notebooks, Zack. Lots of them. That I study with." 

"But do you have journals?" Zack handed the notebook at the top of the pile to Cloud. "Writing stuff down in a journal's supposed to help you work out your feelings and identify your patterns of distress. You know, to help with homesickness."

"I'm _not_\--" Cloud frowned. That had sounded... incredibly not-Zack. "How many self-help books did you read?"

"It wasn't a self-help book. I looked it up online."

Cloud flipped the notebook open--it was one of the graph ones--to a blank page and slapped it down on the desk. He grabbed a pen. _Zack Fair,_ Cloud wrote, _is a huge dork who needs to mind his own business__._

* * *

"Time to take out your home~work~," Zack chanted.

Cloud let out a token groan and gently took his new costs-more-than-his-mother-makes-in-a-month phone out of his pocket. He slowly navigated to the gallery. He left the cursor on the first of the latest ten pictures. It was either do Zack's "homework" or suffer having Zack ruffle his hair every. Single. Time their paths crossed. Taking ten pictures of random things in Midgar was a small price to pay.

Zack plucked the phone out of Cloud's hands and looked through the pictures. People waiting for a train. Sephiroth looking at something to the right and off-camera. Loveless Avenue. The snack kiosk in the Shinra Building's main lobby. Sephiroth talking with Zack.

Zack closed the gallery after the third photo with Sephiroth in it. "I don't know if I should be impressed or creeped out that you're stalking Sephiroth."

Cloud felt his face grow warm. Getting flushed so easily _sucked_. "I am _not_ stalking Sephiroth."

"Okay, okay, you're being a fanboy. I get it."

Cloud wanted to yank his phone back, but the idea of it slipping from his fingers and breaking put a stop to it.

Zack was nice enough to print out that photo of himself and Sephiroth talking. Cloud stuck it in the notebook he'd been writing in, for safe keeping.

* * *

Cloud knocked at Zack's door. It wasn't like he'd never been to the Soldiers' section of the barracks before. But this was... different.

Zack threw the door open. "Welcome to cultural exchange night!" He pulled Cloud into the apartment. The table was piled with snacks and plastic bottles filled with the gods only knew what. A pile of DVD's was right in the middle.

Cloud sat down slowly, hoping that nothing would fall over or spill. "You should've told me. I could've brought--"

"Cultural exchange night," Zack said, "Is so you can learn all about the rich and varied traditions that a cosmopolitan city such as Midgar has to offer."

Cloud looked at Zack. "Did you look _that_ up online?"

Zack smiled and shook his head. "It was in a company brochure."

Cloud grabbed the DVD at the top of the stack. The cover showed a woman swimming and a giant shrimp looming over her. "So Midgar's culture is shitty movies."

"Shitty movies _and_ snacks that are inferior ripoffs of stuff from other places." 

"Any from Gongaga?"

Zack grabbed a pink and white bag and flopped down at Cloud's side. "I _think_ these chips? They aren't made with yucca, though." He opened the bag and plucked out a chip. "You see anything from Nibelheim?"

Cloud poked at a box of spice cookies that looked absolutely nothing like his mother's pfeffernusse. "This, maybe." He opened the box, took out a cookie, and had a bite. They also _tasted_ absolutely nothing like his mother's pfeffernusse.

Cloud stayed until stupid o'clock in the morning. He declined Zack's invitation to just sleep there because he still had _some_ sense of responsibility and got back to his bunk in one piece. He managed a paragraph on how fun it was to watch horrible movies and eat horrible snacks with someone before he fell asleep.

* * *

Cloud felt like his arms were going to fall off of his body. Everything past his shoulders hurt. He wished he'd never learned how much sword drills sucked when you were just starting to learn them.

"Okay, now do it again." Zack, who of course did this every day, looked like he'd only taken a stroll around the building. "Looked a little messy at the end."

"I _can't_," Cloud said. "My _arms_ can't." Cloud was ninety percent sure Zack had forgotten that Cloud did _not_ have Soldier strength and stamina. The other ten percent was sure Zack was just being a dick.

"We're building up a routine so you can work on your arm strength." Zack rotated his neck and shoulders, then began to stretch his arms. Cloud's envy reached new and previously unknown levels. "Your pain is weakness leaving your--"

Cloud aimed a kick to Zack's shin. 

Zack made a quarter turn to the left. His shin remained un-kicked. He nodded. "Your form's good, but leg day is tomorrow."

Cloud was going to write at _least_ three pages on how much sword drills sucked and how much of a dick Zack was. Once his arms worked again.

* * *

Zack wanted to wrap himself in all of the blankets. It was too cold and too dark to do anything, and he was going to milk his First Class privileges to make sure he'd spend the day as a blanket burrito, the way the gods and nature intended.

Cloud found him sometime in the afternoon. The windows were letting in as much light as they were going to for the day, which was approximately nothing. Cloud peeled off the outermost layer of Zack's blanket burrito. Zack was too done to complain. "Are you sick?"

"It looks like crap outside," Zack said. "'m taking a mental health day."

"Midgar _always_ looks like crap outside," Cloud answered. 

"Winter doubles down on the crap," Zack said. "_Quadruples_ down on it." 

"I'll make something for us to eat," Cloud said. "Just... take a nap or whatever." Zack rolled to the side and dozed off.

When Zack came to again, he smelled home. Beans, pork, garlic, rice. The scent called back other little memories: running around the kitchen as his mother called for another ingredient she needed, his mother humming while she stirred the pot, his father always taking three helpings. 

Zack managed to pull himself out of the blanket burrito and sit up before Cloud appeared, carrying two bowls of feijoada. Zack took a bowl and stared at it for a bit. He breathed in. "I haven't had this in _forever._" 

Cloud sat down at Zack's side. "I looked up Gongagan food and found a recipe." Cloud used his spoon to move a piece of pork around his bowl. "I've never seen you eat it and I thought--" Cloud shrugged. "--maybe it'd been a while. It looked like it was good for a cold day."

Zack made sure his first spoonful had the stew and the rice. The taste was a little off--it wasn't his mother's, after all--but it was still _home_. He took another spoonful, and tried not to ugly cry.


End file.
